


glimmering and vast

by sodiumflare



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Life During Wartime, certain liberties with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-08-09 12:11:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7801381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minerva, in and between the wars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	glimmering and vast

She lives in a small set of chambers fourteen floors up; she has a window with a view rivaling the Astronomy Tower. The bed, she notes, becomes less spartan every year to accommodate aging bones, and she suspects one of Albus's charms is at work on the old mattress. She has a fire that builds itself every morning and banks itself at night; she has never been fully comfortable with house elves in her living quarters. Perhaps it is only the feline part of her, but she always swears she can see them just outside her periphery, quick like mice.

Even in human form, she can feel her phantom tail flick. 

Her library is compact but complete. It hardly rivals Albus's - it's questionable whether any library in the world rivals Albus's, although there are rumors of a room full of books that goes on forever deep below The Forbidden City.  But hers suits her purposes, and between Albus and Madame Pince, she can usually find the material she needs. 

\-- 

"We'll love you wherever you land," her mother had said before she got on the train, and so it is with perfect clarity of mind that she thinks  _Gryffindor_ when the hat lands on her head.

"I thought as much," the hat chuckles, and shouts the word to the hall. Her ears ring for the rest of the feast. 

\--

 She pays little attention to the small boy with coal-black hair sorted into Slytherin the following year.

 Later, she will regret this. 

 --

Minerva is in her second year and struggling to convince her friends not to call her  _Minnie_  when news of Grindelwald's actions abroad finally penetrate even Hogwart's thick walls. She had disregarded most of the rumors; even then, the  _Daily Prophet_ had a reputation for crafting useful fiction out of less titillating reality.

Years later, over a glass of brandy one Christmas night, Albus finally tells her about Grindelwald. It's less of a surprise than it should be, but she's learned that when Albus makes mistakes, they tend to be on the grand scale - and that he does not rest until every wrong has been righted. Perhaps that is why he appears to sleep so little, later. 

On the other hand, he does show her the rumored scar, and they agree that it does have its uses. 

Minerva had considered, then, mentioning the recent rumors of a charismatic young wizard speaking Grindelwald's words, then decided against it. Albus always appeared to have the weight of several worlds on his back. 

- 

Her last year at Hogwarts is marked by damp clouds of fear both within and without the school, and by June, she is itching to leave, the warm stones of Hogwarts chafing like wet wool on her skin. In one of a Continental cousin's carefully worded letters, she suggests how useful a young woman to help with the barn work would be. As Angeline has four sisters and no barn, Minerva takes this for the invitation it is and leaves the night after graduation.

The flight across the Channel is disconcertingly calm; the stars shine bright like sparks, and she flies high until she is well over the fields of northern France. Angeline has a house in Lille, and she hides there in the attic for a few days before Angeline's friends can smuggle her the basement where they'd hidden food, weapons, a gently-charmed Muggle wireless, and occasionally people.

The next morning, she meets a Polish Jew who can turn himself into a field mouse and back again. 

"Teach me," she says. She cannot imagine anything more useful than unhindered access in broad daylight.

There is sorrow in his eyes; it is a hard skill to master, he says. Later, Angeline quietly explains that his family wasn't able to learn before they were taken; they thought they would be safe at first, but then it was too late, too late. 

But Minerva is of limited help during daylight hours, with her badly-accented French, so she struggles day after day under his tutelage until after months of work, her pupils flare into sharp ovals without her needing to touch her wand. 

He smiles; pride, she thinks, in his eyes. "So," he says, "you can play a long game."

"I'm sorry - the what game?"

Angeline smiles. "You're from an island," she says. "History takes longer here. Grindelwald is -" She pauses, parsing the words in English. "There are always men like him."

Two months after  _that_ , and she is a fully-fledged Animagus; with the strength of a force she can never quite name she transforms herself and then back again. There and back. There and back. There and back. They craft networks among Muggles and wizards alike: a woman hangs laundry, and a cat chases a grasshopper in the street. There are three pillowcases and two pairs of stockings, which means that two nights later there will be a truck, and she and Angeline will intercept it. A quick flick of a wand turns a box of grenades into a box of cricket balls, and Jacob pitches them into the cowpond. So it goes.

She dislikes the _messiness_ of oblivating memories, but she can't simply allow Muggles to retain the memory of a cat turning into a woman in front of them. Despite her best efforts, though, folk tales of a spirit in the form of a kindly barn cat persist for a generation. 

Well, it's not like anyone ever actually  _believes_  them. 

-  

Two years later - leaner, and with a definite catlike look around the eyes (she wonders, later and idly, if the transfiguration's marks are as apparent to everyone else as they are to her), she returns to England and finds that Hogwarts is indeed still open. She only hears any details about Grindelwald's defeat when she reads the newspapers back home; everything in France had been rumor and suspicion. 

She takes a job on Diagon Alley, testing found antiquities; with so many Muggle and Wizarding families dead, heirlooms are looted wholesale and it is imperative that any transfigured or cursed objects are located before they can damage anyone. She is thorough and patient, and very good at her job. Words of her skills spread, and she is from time to time contacted by governments with a vested interest in discovering whether their treasures are indeed real. One day, a restive Russian wizard appears with a paper-wrapped package holding what appears to be a magnificent gold necklace. He doesn't care if it is fake, he says; he simply wants to know either way.

It is of no small amusement to her, later, to know that Priam's Treasure is a shoddily-transfigured string of shell casings. She'd asked the Russian wizard if he wanted the transfiguration job augmented, at least; in certain lights, it wouldn't even hold up to Muggle eyes. He'd smiled sadly and shook his head, even after she offered to do it free of charge. 

Years later, she will think of that necklace and her fingers will tingle, slightly, with the desire to find it and  _fix_  it. 

Next follows a particularly memorable incident involving a number of gold watches that turned out to be transfigured baby pythons - she suggests to her superior that it was a smuggling scheme, although she cannot guess whether it was the pythons or the watches that were being smuggled, and four days later half a dozen respected jewelers and one exotic pet emporium employee are arrested in broad daylight in Diagon Alley. 

\-- 

They didn't call women Aurors then.

\-- 

Not long after, a number of Vermeers that turned out to be transfigured dirty cartoons puts _her_ name in the news for the first time, and now not all of her clients are as savory as they were. Once, a young man with an oddly lisping accent turns up on her doorstep at the dead of night, demanding that she examine an odd piece of jewelry, but she turns him away, finally threatening to Transfigure him into a badger. 

Years later, she will remember the peculiar inky blackness of his hair and the strange pulling of the skin around his nose, and when she finally tells Albus about it, he will look simultaneously weary and relieved, a face she becomes accustomed to him wearing that year. She never asks why.

\-- 

Not long after one of her investigations leads to the unfortunate implication of several mid-level Ministry officials in a scheme to transfigure the bones of the war dead into copies of expensive heirlooms destroyed by the Luftwaffe, Albus Dumbledore unexpectedly turns up outside her office, holding several greasy wrapped packages and what turns out to be a contract.

She has not seen him since Hogwarts, although obviously he has turned up in the papers, and the fact that she trained under Albus Dumbledore is beginning to add a certain prestige to her already sizable professional reputation. They were not particularly close at Hogwarts; Minerva was already cultivating her habits of efficiency and prickliness, and she rarely needed his help or desired his praise. 

So it's a bit of a surprise when he offers her a job over fish and chips. 

She accepts because to turn it down would be unthinkable, and only considers later than night over dinner in her flat that this job will actually involve teaching. 

\--

Four days after she moves to Hogwarts, her former flat off Diagon Alley is destroyed in a freak explosion of greenish flame. Ministry wizards demand a list of any illegal substances that might have been housed on the premises, and are making themselves decidedly unpleasant when Dumbledore turns up and politely escorts them off the castle grounds. 

Perhaps a year after she begins teaching (and notices to her surprise that students actually learn under her tutelage; she makes a note to make turning furniture into animals a permanent fixture on her syllabus), Dumbledore is late to dinner and appears - for the first time she can remember since her sixth year - unsettled.

She does not ask. The headmaster keeps his own counsel. 

\-- 

Initially, she assumes that it is a slow news week when the  _Daily Prophet_  begins printing nebulous rumors about a second Grindelwald - such stories have been standard features in secondary tabloids since the day after his imprisonment - but when the rumors begin to build into something possibly resembling fact, she begins to quietly augment her lesson plans, building in quiet instructions of how to hide and how to fight and when it is wisest to do which.

Her quicker students pick it up. It saves a few of them, in the end.

\-- 

She hates to think that they were extraordinary from the beginning, but they  _were_ , with a combination of verve and skill that makes her wonder about what she might have missed during her school days. Albus seems amused by them in a way she somewhat fails to understand, but Albus has a gift for seeing what no one else does. (Later she will remember that Sirius Black always did remind her of a Labrador retriever. And Pettigrew - well.) 

It's small wonder when Lily Evans and James Potter are made Head Boy and Girl; less of a wonder when they start dating; and even less when they marry. Neither have family present at the ceremony: by then, James's are dead, and Lily's (Muggles, if Minerva recalls) are an absence everyone seems careful not to name. But there's wine, and dancing, and fairy lights in the gardens, and Sirius's speech only goes on slightly too long before Remus hauls him down off the table. 

By then, the  _Prophet_  has begun including a daily supplement listing the names of the dead. Hope is in small supply. But she still dares nonetheless.

\--

Rumors build, and with them, fear.

Angeline is by now ten years dead, and Jacob left for America when the war ended, but she still knows how to build networks, and the Order gives her a framework to organize her stringers around. She orders them by geography, from Inverness to Brighton, with countersigns and check-in codes, and it's not laundry along the track but it's not so different, really, and neither are the stakes. She's been here before, and she was good at this before, but it's in her home now, in her students and her school, and she sometimes thinks, over the embers of a dying fire, _I never thought this would happen again_.

 -- 

When he is at the school and not away dealing with a Ministerial matter, she and Albus begin meeting for nightcaps, sometimes in his office, sometimes in hers. She keeps shortbread in tins, and he charms one into a small turtle. She keeps it in a glass tank by a shaded window in her rooms. 

She prefers tea to brandy but Albus seems not to care; he will take her company however she cares to give it. For Christmas one year, she gives him a polka-dot scarf she transfigured out of gloves and a hat, and teaches him the counterspell to shift between the three. To say he is delighted is an understatement. 

\--

War has a way of tangling simple gestures, she knows, but it can also magnify them, and the photo Lily sends of baby Harry, a few days old, still folded like a cabbage and squalling, is a small speck of light in an otherwise dim world. 

They call off the search for Caradoc that same day, and she tries not to think of it as a trade, one life for another.

Minerva was never quite so good at Charms as Albus, but there's little to be gained by comparing herself to the incomparable, and so she charms a handful of leaves from Sprout's greenhouse into a mobile of fluttering birds, owls it back. Lily was always good at Charms, Minerva remembers - if nothing else, she'll appreciate the spellwork. 

\--

One day she returns to her office from classes to find Albus pacing , a light in his eyes she has not seen since he hired Severus.

"What do you know of Secret-Keepers?" he asks when the door is shut behind her.

She knows a little, more based on practice than theory; they were used to some effect during the War, but Secret-Keepers rely on uncomplicated loyalties, and in the War, many a devastated family discovered that loyalties were often not as uncomplicated as they had thought. Wars are like that, she supposes.

"They're risky," she says. "Generally ill-advised, although I will admit that there are rare times where they may be appropriate."

Albus is staring into the fire.

"Albus," she says hesitatingly, "is there something you'd like to tell me?"

It is the first time she has ever pried.

"No, Minerva," he says. "Or rather: I hope not."

She waits. 

"It's chess," he says finally. "The Muggle kind, where nobody talks - and the lamps are doused."

\--

Less than a week later, she wakes with a jolt to her name echoing out of the darkness. Emmeline Vance's patronus, an Iberian wolf, stands in front of her bed, glowing like a comet, and Emmeline's voice echoes out of it, as if from the bottom of a well: _Rumors from multiple sources that You-Know-Who has fallen_.

Minerva's heart thuds in her ears. "Where?"

_Godric's Hollow._

"Who? And how?"

Emmeline considers a long time before replying, her wolf staring at Minerva with its empty eyes. _Unsure_.

"Report when you know more," Minerva says, and the wolf dissolves like a burst of snow in the wind.

Bathilda should be at Godric's Hollow, if she isn't visiting her daughter - but no, her daughter was killed, a week before Caradoc vanished. Minerva unstoppers the bottle of Floo powder on the hearth, flings a handful into the flames, crouches before them as she ties her dressing gown more securely, although heavens knows Bathilda's seen her in less. She leans into the flames. "Bathilda?"

Bathilda is standing at the sink, facing away from the fire, elbows braced and staring out the window. The is a thin line on the horizon. Her curlers are still in; like Minerva, she seems to have roused in a hurry, and there's a commotion somewhere outside. "Minerva?" She draws a shade tight over the kitchen window, hurries to the fire.

"What's happened?"

"I'm not sure," Bathilda says, quietly. "There was such a ruckus outside, and a scream and a bang -" She breaks off. "I'll - I'll go look."

"Constant vigilance," Minerva says, and Bathilda smiles grimly, tucking her wand into her dressing gown pocket and crossing into the hall; the sound of a door, and a sudden draft.

Crouched on the hearth at Hogwarts, Minerva's knees ache. She's getting too old for this.

Bathilda reappears a few moments later, face wan and drawn. "James and Lily are dead," she says, "I saw the bodies."

Minerva's heart freezes. "What else."

"It's hard to say," Bathilda says, "swarming with Ministry wizards -" and she snorts, because what good have Ministry wizards been recently? - "but I think -" She pauses. "I think there might have been a baby."

For an instant, Minerva is sure she's misheard. "A _baby_? Alive?"

"That's what one said," Bathilda says. "You don't think -"

It's nearly too incredible to consider. And yet.

"I need to go," Minerva says. "If you hear of anything else - "

Bathilda nods firmly. "I'll send word, quick as I can."

\--

Withdrawn from the fire, Minerva pulls herself up into a chair, feeling her old bones complaining in protest. A wave of her wand gets tea started.

Harry. Harry Potter.

She has a man - Calum - in one of the Auror units, and she's very nearly sure he's not a Death Eater; she's absolutely sure he doesn't know who she is, and the deposits in his Gringotts accounts are large enough to keep him from inquiring too closely. There's a bewitched business card in his wallet that matches one in her desk. _Update_ , she scrawls on it. _Godric's Hollow_. The ink lingers for a second before vanishing.

Her tea is cold in her cup and she has very nearly paced through the rug when he replies:  _Potters dead_.

It hurts less the second time. She will grieve for them later. _Baby?_

 _Alive_.

 _Y.K.W?_. It can't hurt to ask.

A pause, and then: _Unclear_.

\--

Albus is just as likely away from Hogwarts as the is to be there at any given moment, so it feels like a toss-up, but she sends her Patronus to the Headmaster's tower anyway, buttering toast while half her attention travels through the castle like particularly coalescent smoke. Distracted, she doesn't hear Bathilda until the woman shouts her name from the fire, in her robes, now, and her hair is free of the curlers but still unbrushed.

"Arabella Figg heard from her man at the _Prophet_ ," Bathilda says. "There's definitely a baby, and it's almost definitely Harry."

He's alive. Somehow, the boy lived.

" _And_ ," Bathilda says, "Figgy's man says that Albus is at the scene. Won't let the Ministry take the boy. Says Hagrid's with him." Through her Patronus, Minerva can see that Albus's rooms are empty (Fawkes looks dreadful - must be nearly burning season), and she releases the spell. When Albus is gone, she's Deputy Headmistress.

Minerva feels her eyes close. Of course Albus won't let the Ministry have custody. Of course Albus would bring a half-giant with him. Some people have hobbies; Albus has his grief and his guilt. And his knitting. "Well," Minerva says, "he'll be there awhile. Is there anything else?"

"You-Know-Who _dead_ ," Bathilda says, rolling the words wonderingly on her tongue. "Who would have believed it?"

"Who, indeed," Minerva says. She's not sure, still, that she does. 

\--

Before the sun is fully in the sky, Ted Tonks has confirmed Lupin's location - in his flat, apparently unaware of the night's events. Order surveillance was outside all night, because - well. Because. "Is Black there?" she asks from Ted's fire, and Ted shakes his head. "He's not been around as much, lately," he says, awkwardly.

 _Because of the spy_ , Minevera thinks, banishes the thought. It's not _him_ ; Lupin doesn't have a duplicitous bone in his body. She had seven years to watch him try to cover up for his friends, and he was always terrible at it. But Moody and the others had insisted. "Do we know where Black is? Pettigrew?"

"Andromeda works down the street from Peter, she'll stop by on her way in," Ted says. "No clue on Black, he hasn't stayed in one place for weeks now."

Especially not since the Potters went into hiding. Hard to be the doting godfather anyone to dote on, and with Lupin under suspicion... "Someone will need to tell Lupin," she says. "It would be best if they were - " Kind. Not Moody. Not the Prophet.

"I'll do it meself," Ted says. "Not handing it to Moody or any of these other surveillance blokes, they're right arses. And I'll try to get someone on Sirius. Maybe Andromeda - they always got along, she knows him better than some." He pauses. "So Harry will go with Sirius, yeah?"

Minerva has no idea. If this were a normal situation, yes - there are strict laws about how long a child can be kept by the Ministry if a suitable guardian is available - but if Albus successsfully keeps the child out of Ministry custody, who knows? The rules are all broken. "I'm not sure. Give my best to Remus," she says, awkwardly, as if that's the sort of thing you tell someone when they've found out one of their best friends is dead.

"You-Know-Who dead and little Harry Potter alive," Ted says, wonderingly. "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"

She hasn't. She clambers backward out of the fire for the second time that morning. Owls would be too slow now, and anyway no one uses owls for anything serious in wartime, but they're certainly easier on a body.

So what in Merlin's name _is_ Albus planning? And where does he expect the boy to go, if not to Sirius? And why not Sirius, anyway? He's been in poor showing lately, but that doesn't make one unfit to parent, and he loves Harry, which puts him ahead of some parents she's known.

Ted's closing words echo back to her. _Harry Potter_ , she thinks, _the boy who lived_. She's never heard of anything like this before. Perhaps Albus hasn't, either. So James and Lily are dead and Voldemort's gone and Harry is alive. This is bigger than all of them: it feels like old magic, the kind that breaks and binds. Where do you hide an infant in a world turned upside down?

The memory comes, unbidden: Sirius, bow tie off-center and shirt untucked, standing on a table and improvising his way through his Best Man speech at the wedding, almost gesturing to a pair of empty seats before Remus pulled him down and refilled his glass. Minerva thinks of the sister Lily was so careful to never mention and tiny birds in a mobile and chess pieces in the dark, and Minerva knows where Albus is taking the boy.

\--

Flitwick is generally unflappable - a strong quality among Hogwarts staff - and only stares a little when she deputizes him in his house shoes in his rooms, never mind the utter lack of precedent ("Abandoning your post!" Sir Cadogan yowls as she leaves his room, and a sympathetic suit of armor gestures at the painting threateningly). The castle is only barely stirring to life, and the library is empty. Student records are kept in a well-hidden enlargened drawer, and meticulously organized, automatically updated: Miss Pince would allow nothing less. Lily's file is the second Evans listed, and she thumbs it open - 

_Number 4, Privet Drive_

She'll need to Apparate to Surrey and get off the grounds to do it, and she moves faster as a cat, so she shifts before leaving the castle. She feels younger as a cat - aching joints don't hurt as much, and her eyes are still sharp in this form. Loping down the track to Hogsmeade, she feels the wind ruffle her fur and scents the old, familiar smells of a village at night, and feels it welling inside her, the long game building in her bones again - 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," because I am nothing if not the sum of my high school education.  
>  __  
> The sea is calm tonight.  
>  The tide is full, the moon lies fair  
> Upon the straits; on the French coast the light  
> Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,  
> Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.  
> Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!  
> Only, from the long line of spray  
> Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,  
> Listen! you hear the grating roar  
> Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,  
> At their return, up the high strand,  
> Begin, and cease, and then again begin,  
> With tremulous cadence slow, and bring  
> The eternal note of sadness in.


End file.
